1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and an image processing method that accelerate the frame rate of video data.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are at present time well-known techniques for accelerating the frame rate of video data (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-191268). In accordance with the technique of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 10-191268, a video signal having 50 frames per second is converted to 100 frames per second using field interpolation.
Furthermore, it is also known to display menu screens and other images (computer graphics) by compositing them with video images, with images of increasingly higher quality (e.g. high-definition animation images, etc.) being composited in recent years. A display device including circuitry that generates computer graphics signals is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-181440.
When interpolation frames are generated based on field interpolation etc., large amounts of data are read out from a frame memory as well as written to a frame memory.
In addition, when image data representing high-quality images is generated, large amounts of data are also read out from a frame memory as well as written to a frame memory.
Therefore, compositing high-quality images with video simultaneously with frame rate acceleration requires the data transmission bandwidth of the frame memory to be expanded. However, it is difficult to expand the data transmission bandwidth as much as one might want to because the expansion of the data transmission bandwidth of the frame memory brings about a cost increase.
As a result, situations arise, in which the data transmission bandwidth creates a bottleneck and image data representing high-quality images cannot be generated.